Analytica is a research and training association for the production of clinical and theoretical work in analysis, philosophy, and related fields of the arts and sciences. Analytica is unique in developing a project to produce a clinic and place for pure analysis. We seek to further Freud and Lacan’s project of taking psychoanalysis out of the medical and therapeutic paradigm and into a new form of psychic transformation and social relation. Analytica exists for the production of analysis not for the production of analysts. The question of whether one wants to further one’s professional practice – for example as a doctor, teacher, artist, scientist, or otherwise – with their analytic work is unique to each person. Analytica does not require or provide degrees, licenses, or exams, which are relevant to the university or state of each member. Analytica is concerned with the production of analysis in extension as a form of transmission and transformation of social relations by means of the analytic discourse, and thus it functions as a school, clinic, laboratory, gallery, theatre, and publisher for the production of its members.

After 30 years of participation in diverse psychoanalytic institutions – as well as other medical, therapeutic, and pedagogical institutions – we initiated our own version of an analytic institute. Analytica began as an informal research and training institute for the future of psychoanalysis. This aim comprises several projects including reconnecting psychoanalysis to its roots in “Analysis” as invented by the Greeks at the turn of Western thought in the passage from the presocratic philosopher-poets through the work of Heraclitus, Socrates, and Plato – steering between the hysterical equivocation of the sophists and the academic rigidity of the academy. This “symptom” or dilemma went underground during the resurgence of the discourse of the master in the Roman Catholic church before being re-opened in the enlightenment through the spread of reason and the augmentation of the discourse of the university into the population producing the divided subject of alienation on a large scale – finally to be diagnosed or named by Freud in the twentieth century as neurosis or the discourse of hysteria. Lacan perceived Freud’s discovery and invention to be closing up under the general formation of a rigid body of theory and practice in psychoanalytic institutions rendering it no better than the inertial discourse of medicine or psychology. In the 1960s after being excommunicated from the analytic orthodoxy for a second time, Lacan created a new form of institute, association, or school for the production of analysis. Throughout the seventies Lacan shifted his focus further to experimental mathematics and poetics – the domain of a-signifying semiotics – where meaning is literally formed, created, or constructed – as a model for analytic practice and institutional transmission – even to bring together the school and clinic into one continuum from analysis in intension to analysis in extension.

Lacan invented or re-affirmed several important ideas of analytic operation. He declared that the analyst authorizes himself by himself in relation to some others, thus restoring the stress on “auto-analysis.” He removed entrance requirements, graduation exams. degrees, titles, and other bureaucratic and hierarchical procedures. He placed himself in the continued position of the analysand by free-associating his seminar as a form of writing in situ – even encouraging his listeners in the position of analysts to question him. He created the cartel as a form of collective work group to replace classes. He experimented with a form of research and transmission of analytic experience called the pass to replace case presentations and other graduation methods. In his latest seminars he suggested increasingly that analysis was best performed as a form of writing – using topological diagrams and poetic invention almost exclusively. Despite all of this, before his death he dissolved his school declaring it unfit to carry on without him. We each must reinvent analysis for our selves – not just as a practice as Lacan stated but as an institution as he implied.